We Are All One...

"We all live within the same illusion and are, in our own way and in our own time, trying to understand the truth behind it all. Some may not be looking at the moment or even in this particular life, but ultimately we will all wake up from the dream and remember who we really are. Ultimately, we will all become one..."

- Aaron Hutchins

Monday, January 7, 2013

Pain Is The Feeling Of Healing

The body is quite remarkable and intuitive, particularly when it is working in conjunction with the mind. The very moment that the body becomes injured it begins implementing the process of healing instinctively, but when this process is supported by the mind as well it can be an unstoppable force. It's true that when we sustain an injury our nerves are affected and we feel heightened sensations from what we call "pain receptors" in the body, but perhaps these sensual encounters are more than meets the eye.
Obviously, no one likes to get hurt and without injury, the body seems to have a natural balance. What if, however, we're not fully taking perception into account? What if pain only feels adverse to us because "painful" is all we've ever really known "pain" to be? What if we have only programmed ourselves to see it that way, rather than to view it as a beautiful new opportunity to learn and to heal? We tend to look at the negatives in our society. It's bred into us and those feelings most certainly affect how we heal.
We all know that through experiments using the placebo effect, science has proven time and time again that positive thoughts and beliefs about the body can actually speed up the healing process. We also know through quantum physics that sub-atomic particles, the very foundation of matter, can be affected simply through conscious focus and thought. So, why wouldn't this work for our bodies as well? If the very stuff that everything is made up of can be affected by thought, then it only makes sense that thought would have a direct affect on the body. There have been countless studies showing how negative thoughts and stress actually degrade the health of the body, so why wouldn't the reverse be true? Why wouldn't positive thoughts promote the health of the body?

We live in a culture that tends to focus on what's wrong as a means to putting things right. It doesn't even seem to occur to us that focusing our thoughts on the negative, even with a positive end goal in mind, might actually be counter intuitive to bringing more positive into our lives. So, it seems to me that if our bodies are so receptive to the way we feel about them, then maybe pain as we know it is not really what we think it is. What if pain is actually the feeling of healing and the negative sensations that we experience are only the result of a lifetime of self conditioning and negative thoughts that we have sent to the body, which has only served the purpose of slowing down its natural healing rate? We already know that pain is entirely perceptual as we've all heard of the term "pain threshold", which, of course, is a term used to define the exact level of intensity that an individual begins to feel pain. Each individual's threshold is different according to their perception of what "pain" truly is. We know it's perceptual by the fact that a person can condition themselves mentally to not feel pain and, in fact, can even alter their perception of pain to the point where pain seems to be a pleasurable thing.

Healing seems to be a natural process. It's hard wired into our bodies, but perhaps pain is not, as what we feel, and how much of it we feel, seems to be left entirely up to our own perceptions. So, if we begin to shift those perceptions we have of our bodies and our lives into a more positive place and meditate daily on those positive things, it seems likely that our own capacity for healing and personal well being will rise to the occasion as well. Then, we human beings can truly begin to explore our own unlimited potential.